Microsoft announced some new options for Azure, including that starting now, you can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from the Azure Marketplace.

Microsoft announced a partnership with Red Hat back in November, and this is Microsoft delivering on that announcement.

"Using these instances, customers of Red Hat and Microsoft will now be able to rapidly and seamlessly deploy instances for on-demand workloads, dev-test, and cloud bursting – all with the simplicity, scalability, agility and unique per-minute billing flexibility of Azure," says Azure director of program management Corey Sanders. "The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions, except China and US Government, and can be deployed directly from the Azure Marketplace."

"Since we announced our partnership in November, we’ve seen strong interest and momentum from our customers looking to bring their Red Hat investments to Azure," he adds. "We offer the best enterprise-grade support of the public cloud, by offering a fully integrated support experience with co-located Red Hat and Microsoft support engineers sitting side-by-side to help you when you need it!"

Microsoft and Red Hat worked together to see that Red Hat subscriptions purchased through the Azure Marketplace provide integrated support through direct access to the Red Hat customer portal.

Other announcements are that the Azure Container Service preview is now available for everyone and that Microsoft is certifying for the Azure Marketplace a group of Linux images created by Bitnami. They're also enabling OneOps on Azure. More info on all of this here.